


maybe i'm a bad, bad, bad, bad person

by postfixrevolution



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Arguing, But Not For Long!, Established Relationship, M/M, Mild Language, Post-Game, Unhappy Ending, Unresolved Emotional Tension, bro i am straight up not having a good time and neither are they, vent writing i am so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-22 16:33:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21079889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postfixrevolution/pseuds/postfixrevolution
Summary: —well, baby, i know..there is an ultimatum in every stolen kiss — strength or sylvain.





	maybe i'm a bad, bad, bad, bad person

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta-ed. route doesn't matter so long as it isn't blue lions, although tbh i imagined golden deer. 
> 
> title from [love love love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beiPP_MGz6I) by of monsters and men; it's a good sylvain angst song...

As everyone goes their separate ways after the war ends, it becomes evident that Sylvain and Felix no longer have an army, a cause, or a kingdom to belong to.

There is no more reason to fight, but Felix spends his days before the monastery empties of his ex-classmates and ex-allies as he has spent every day before: on the training grounds. He cannot stomach their idealistic whispers of futures spent together, futures rebuilding what has been destroyed—as if fresh stone and marble could ever replace what used to be wrought from flesh and soul. 

It is premature, but Felix knows that if he ever sees a statue of Dimitri, he will not hesitate to recall the war-time crackle of Thoron between his fingertips just to smite the boar's carved likeness into dust. It wouldn't be the first time he has destroyed something precious. In a future spent ignoring the heavy legacy of his name, he knows that it will certainly not be the last.

There are some things, though, that make chasing that future hard.

Like a planet in the sights of his smoldering sun, Sylvain knows exactly where to orbit to find himself caught in Felix's pull. The actual sun tiptoes at the top of its noontime precipice when the heavy iron doors open up. The training grounds have always been large, but then, so has Sylvain. When he walks in and leans against one of the unused training targets, he fills the grounds with a presence far bigger than the set of his shoulders, yet smaller by far than the unfathomable way his deerskin-hazel eyes seem to see everything all at once.

"You never change."

His voice drips heavy with fondness, drawing Felix's gaze like a fly to the way it oozes as golden and sweet as honey. Felix has never had a liking for sweets, but Sylvain seems to consistently be his only exception.

"Did you mean what you said the other day?" he hums, hazel eyes low and lazy as they trace Felix's footwork. "About going off to become a mercenary?"

Felix ducks beneath an imaginary axe, spinning along an arc that buries the butt of his sword into the training dummy's kidney. That kind of hit would usually be enough to knock a soldier off balance, and Felix's sword would trace up the curvature of their spine with sharpened silver and ease. With his back to Sylvain and his target, Felix sheaths his sword.

"When have I ever joked with you, Sylvain?"

Sylvain hums, noncommittal.

"There's a first time for everything. I want you to come back with me."

Felix turns to face him, a single eyebrow cocked at him.

"To Gautier?"

"To Faerghus."

He can't meet Sylvain's eyes when he says it, even if there's nothing about the words that really bears hiding between the two of them: "There is no more Faerghus." Felix wonders how he looks as he tells Sylvain this just as much as he wonders how Sylvain looks; those wide, hazel eyes surely flash with something painful as they look at him beneath thick, furrowed brows. He wonders how looks and wonders if his plain copper eyes flash with that same pain.

"Then to Fraldarius," Sylvain intones, reaching down to wrap fingers around his wrists. His thumbs, as always, like to press themselves firm against where Felix's pulse thrums hardest. Felix never quite understood why until he had his mouth pressed to Sylvain's neck, hot against the rushing, _ living _ pulse of his own. "Or to Gautier. Just, back. With me."

"I'm not going back, Sylvain." Felix tugs at his wrists, but he doesn't even put half the strength he knows he would need to pull them free. "This is something I have to do."

"You don't have to—" Sylvain stops, hands tightening around Felix's wrists. "Why do you think you have to _leave?_ You don't have to do _anything_, Felix."

"I don't have to _ leave_, I have to—" he scowls, glaring at the dirt floor, "I have to not come back. I can't. What lives in that cursed manor I grew up in isn't mine." Even Felix can't tell if he means the furniture and lingering ghosts or the living one: the war-weary shell of his dead brother's father. All of it sickens him, so maybe all of it is what he means. "It hasn't been for years."

"So you'll run away from it?" Sylvain snaps. The accusation in his voice makes Felix startle enough to tear his hands from Sylvain's. "Like a coward? That isn't like you at all, Felix."

"That isn't _ like _me?" Felix hardens his gaze as he averts it, as if he still feels the need to cover the searing truths that hide in them even as he tears them out of Sylvain's sights. "I made it clear why I'm not going back. It seems I was wrong in thinking you'd get it."

"I _ get it_, but you're being—" 

"Being _ what?_" Felix growls. "Tell me exactly what you think I am, like you gave a shit about what I actually was this whole time."

Sylvain gawks at him, brows drawn deep and deerskin-hazel eyes as mottled as their unkempt and untamed namesake. Even as Felix's gut twists with guilt, he's never practiced mercy enough to know how to show it, even now.

"You _ don't _ get to pick and choose which parts of me you want to keep," Felix spits. He hears himself say, "it's all or nothing, Sylvain," and _ oh _ how Felix sees the anguish in Sylvain's radiant eyes and wants it to be all, wants every part of Sylvain in return for Sylvain holding tightly to every broken piece of himself. 

His hands shake from how tightly he has curled them into fists, and Sylvain— Sylvain looks so offended, so _ affronted _, to be offered an ultimatum in such a way. As if Felix himself doesn't suffer the same impossible choices in every brush of their greedy, greedy fingers and lips. 

There is an ultimatum in every stolen kiss, desperate and tender in the quiet of their every moment alone: strength or Sylvain — that which can shelter himself (shelter _ everyone _ ) from the brittle cold of the world or that which sits timorously in every lovely, loving moment that never would have brought them together if only Felix could've _ fucking _chosen something aside from beautiful, boundless Sylvain.

"_Felix_." 

Sylvain breathes this sound, his _ name_, out like it is a last breath. With it dies the man who has wildlife warmth in the hazel of his eyes, grown to survive the perils of unforgiving winter. Felix can see the fire that consumes it as it sparks to life: the ruinous blaze of Gautier blood that he knows Sylvain would sooner spill than let last any longer than the meager length of his dwindling years on this earth. 

"You're the _ last _ person that gets to make me choose like this." Those wildfire eyes glower at Felix like they want to swallow him whole, like they think scorching him to nothing but powdery ashes can make him slip through Sylvain's fingers any slower. "Everything or nothing? That's just _ rich_. How can you say that when you've never given _ anyone _ everything," Sylvain spits, "You don't even know what everything _ is _—"

"And _ you _do?" 

Felix rounds on him with his teeth bared, exactly like the cornered animal Sylvain tries to make him feel like. If the paladin thinks the control he so desperately wants can be found in tightening the holds with which he clings to Felix, then he is wrong. There have never been shackles that Felix has not raged against, gnawed off a part of himself just to escape from. This time, what piece of himself he has thought to sink teeth into tastes like bergamot tea and Sylvain. 

"You're more stubborn about your secrets than I am with my training— and _ don't _ say that isn't true, like twenty fucking years hasn't taught me how to know when you're lying."

"Maybe I'd have no reason to lie if you weren't always running away," Sylvain accuses him, "so scared to face the facts: _ nothing _ happens that doesn't have a consequence, Felix. You can't kiss me and tell me not to when I say I want you here—with me—and you can't call me a _ liar _ when you're just as bad at being fucking _ honest_."

"I am _ not _ scared," Felix sneers, "and that was a piss-poor attempt at trying to turn your own bullshit back onto me. You don't know how to be honest with yourself about your own saints-forsaken problems, so you shove them onto _ everyone else_—"

"_I'm _ shoving my problems at people?" Sylvain scoffs at him, voice colder than Gautier winters as it frosts over fast at the hole it feels like there is in Felix's chest. "I know why you can't go back home with me, Felix. You're too scared you might have to accept the responsibility of the title that you've spent your entire life avoiding."

"It was never _ mine_."

"It was yours the moment we buried Glenn—"

"Don't you _ dare _ bring Glenn into this—"

"—and why shouldn't I?" Sylvain challenges him, hazel eyes ablaze. Felix glares back, fists curled tight and trembling at his sides. 

"You don't _ deserve _to talk about him like this—"

"Then why do you?" 

"I'm his _ brother_, you dipshit."

"Some brother you are. You didn't even accept the responsibility he left you with. It's been rotting with him for 10 years, and it'll keep staying there because you're too scared to visit his grave and take it back. Just because you've never looked at his name on that gravestone doesn't mean he isn't buried there, Felix."

And Felix—because he has the sharpened thing sitting so pretty at his waist and because the blaze in Sylvain's eyes is _ terrifying _ him—draws his blade. He listens to the way it sings as it leaves its sheath and knows that the sound calms him but _ terrifies _ Sylvain. His deerskin-hazel eyes are wide, and he rears back like their namesake, staring at the gleam of silver but not at Felix. For the first time in this conversation, he looks away from Felix, and it's because Felix has crossed a line—has shattered his trust in a perfect mirror to Faerghus-pledged soldiers and crestless, jealous brothers. 

The realization strikes him so quickly that his world spins, sword dropping out of his hands just as readily as he had grabbed it. 

"Wait, Sylvain, I—"

Felix grabs at his hand, breath catching when Sylvain stumbles back further to avoid him, those wide eyes still so far away from his own. His head is a mess of anger that's still too fresh to fade and guilt—heavy and churning in his stomach and so, so close to making him vomit. Just because he can't find the intention to forgive or apologize for what has been spoken between them doesn't the abject terror in Sylvain's eyes is something he can be proud of.

"We can talk about this, we need to—"

"I'm not—" Sylvain garbles, backing up until the flat of his back bumps heavy against a training dummy, rattling the both of them in place. "I can't," his eyes flash toward Felix's sword on the ground between them, "You're _ right_, I don't know what you are anymore, you—" 

"_Sylvain_."

"—pointed a _ sword_," he struggles to choke out, and Felix feels that sword in his own stomach, plunged deep and aching into the soft flesh. 

"I didn't _ mean _ to. You can't—"

Felix growls, fingers tearing through his bangs in frustration, and the words that are supposed to be an apology never come out, replaced by some other thing that forces its way past his clenched teeth. "You can't _ say _ these things to me, Sylvain, like I don't fucking feel any of it, and expect me not to—"

"Point a fucking sword at me?" Sylvain hisses, and his eyes meet Felix's then, so wrought with fury that Felix is shocked they don't burn the teary sheen of them clean away. Felix balls his fists tight because Sylvain is _ right_, because they had built so steadily to this exact moment that it's sickening how inevitable it is that the sword on the ground—the one that was just in his hands—should end up drawn as sharp and vicious as the words between them. 

"_Yes_," he intones, and Sylvain huffs out his own violent breath, glaring at the far side of the training grounds. 

"Why am I even surprised?" mutters Sylvain. "You've always been better at acting out than talking, and some things," he sighs, almost imperceptibly, "just don't translate."

"They'd translate," Felix growls lowly, "if you'd get out of your own fucking head for long enough to actually look at me." It's a challenge, daring Sylvain to turn his way as Felix retrieves his sword. The paladin tenses as he slides it back into his sheath, but those eyes finally seem tired of looking at him. They never do drift back in Felix's direction. For some reason, Felix can't bring himself to feel any more disappointed than he already is.

"I won't wait for that day to come," he tells Sylvain. He doesn't tell him that he wants it to, that he'd give anything—he'd consider that unfathomable idea of _ staying_—if only they could actually start to understand each other. It was spoken to him in words this time, the only thing Sylvain ever seemed to fall back on, so maybe there wouldn't be a translation needed, anyway. 

Felix has never been merciful enough to give such luxuries, and he knows it's his fault that he's never practiced how. If he had, he's sure there would be something more to say—something like a reminder, _ come find me the day it does_—but he turns his back to Sylvain instead. 

"Goodbye, Sylvain."

He doesn't let himself wonder if Sylvain finally looks up at him just to see him go.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm also on [twitter](https://twitter.com/panntherism)


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